"A chimera of her own creating": Love and Fantasy in Madame de Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves and Richardson's Clarissa

"A chimera of her own creating": Love and Fantasy in Madame de Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves and Richardson's Clarissa Mildred Sarah E. Greene Arizona State University Mais quoique je me défie de moi-même, je crois que je ne vaincrai jamais mes scrupules et je n'espère pas aussi de surmonter l'inclination que j'ai pour vous. Madame de Lafayette La Princesse de Clèves Readers of classical fiction have observed that there is a literary affinity between Madame de Lafayette's French Princesse de Clèves and Richardson's Clarissa. Ernest A. Baker points out that "Clarissa" is a "variation on the theme of popular romance. . . . The link . . . was not Marivaux . . . but Madame de Lafayette, author of La Princesse de Clèves" (69). But there is a psychological affinity as well. The heroines are two of the earliest examples of the perfectionist woman who suffers from an unresolved psychological conflict between the desire to please the parental society in the choice of a husband and a desire to exert the self to achieve personal happiness. It is with this psychological dimension that this essay is concerned.' The particular psychological type displayed by the heroines is the woman who seems to be arrested at that stage in her psychological development — the Electra stage — where she is overly attached to the father. Therefore, when she meets a man whom she sees as a father figure, she is fearful of an emotional involvement with him. However, she is usually very much attracted to him despite the fact that this similarity to the father, which she imagines, remains unconscious because of its incestuous implications. These heroines not only suffer from the universal conflict of the Electra complex, but they are also in conflict with the authoritarian influences of their society. In other words, the heroines have that conflict with the society that they had with the father in terms of submission and control. Hence their attraction to the "malleable lover"2 on whom they might exercise their control. The woman's control of the malleable lover results from her fear that she cannot experience an intimate relationship with a man who is her intellectual equal. Thus this type of woman attempts to make her husband a "child," while "acting as a mother to him" (Freud 133-34). Karen Horney suggests in "The Over-valuation of Love" that this feminine 221 222Rocky Mountain Review psychological type results from an unsuccessful rivalry with a person of her own sex, a mother or a sister, for the affection of the father. This type of woman lacks confidence in her sexual relationship with a man — often "over-valuing him, like a father, and putting such psychological demands on him that she ultimately drives him away" (182-83). In the literary manifestation of the "malleable lover," his "malleability" often exists not so much in reality as in the mind of the heroine who views him (Van Ghent 62-63; Kettle 74-75). For example, when Clarissa first goes off with Lovelace, she hopes that he will prove "malleable." Anna Howe has to remind Clarissa that she is more vulnerable to Lovelace's contrived shades of "malleability" than she realizes. These literary heroines are also what Horney calls "perfectionist" characters (Neurosis 196, 212-28, 259-90). As such, the heroines display a "perfectionist self-effacing" personality like Madame de Lafayette's French Princesse de Clèves, who is so frightened of her sexual feelings that she appears unaware of them, and in her efforts to control her reality, she turns away from both the father figure and the "malleable lover" and retreats to a convent. At the end of the novel she becomes a "detached personality" (Paris 18). Or, like Richardson's Clarissa, an idealist perfectionist, refusing to become the wife of the man who takes her virginity, she turns to God because her would-be lover refuses to be malleable. This conflict in the literary heroines is between an expression of the genuine self — either in love or in celibacy — and the self imposed by the authoritarian society to participate in a manage de raison for social or political reasons. That...